Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 430 posts

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#341

Post by D-Machine »

bottlepalm wrote: post #26
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

Is every new thing not just combinations of existing things? What does out of distribution even mean? What advancement has ever made that there wasn’t a lead up of prior work to it? Is there some fundamental thing that prevents AI from recombining ideas and testing theories?

> What does out of distribution even mean?

There are in fact ways to directly quantify this, if you are training e.g. a self-supervised anomaly-detection model.

Even with modern models not trained in that manner, looking at e.g. cosine distances of embeddings of "novel" outputs could conceivably provide objective evidence for "out-of-distribution" results. Generally, the embeddings of out-of-distribution outputs will have a large cosine (or even Euclidean) distance from the typical embedding(s). Just, most "out-of-distribution" outputs will be nonsense / junk, so, searching for weird outputs isn't really helpful, in general, if your goal is useful creativity.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#342

Post by tsimionescu »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #321
utopiah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite. Feel like it's a bit what I tried to expressed few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791642 namely that we are just pouring computational resources at verifiable problems then claim that astonishingly sometimes it works. Sure LLMs even have a slight bias, namely they do rely on statistics so i…

> throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, once something finally does report it as grandiose and claim to be "intelligent". What do we think humans are doing? I think it’s not unfair to say our minds are constantly trying to assemble the pieces available to them in various ways. Whether we’re actively thinking about a problem or in the background as we go about our day. Every once in a while the pieces fit together…

While I don't think anyone has a plausible theory that goes to this level of detail on how humans actually think, there's still a major difference. I think it's fair to say that if we are doing a brute force search, we are still astonishingly more energy efficient at it than these LLMs. The amount of energy that goes into running an LLM for 12h straight is vastly higher than what it takes for humans to think about similar problems.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#344

Post by suddenlybananas »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #166
epolanski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an obvious tension created by the title. The reality is: "GPT 5.2 found a more general and scalable form of an equation, after crunching for 12 hours supervised by 4 experts in the field". Which is equivalent to taking some of the countless niche algorithms out there and have few experts in that algo have LLMs crunch tirelessly till they find a better formula. After same experts prompted it in the right directio…

> GPT 5.2 after crunching 12 hours mathematical formulas supervised and prompted by 4 experts in the field Yet, if some student or child achieved the same – under equal supervision – we would call him the next Einstein.

Yes and if a 1 year old could multiply 1357329 by 28384743, I'd be impressed and yet I still wouldn't be impressed by a calculator doing it.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#345

Post by Bengalilol »

square_usual wrote: post #64

It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs. Like with the novel solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for erdos problems - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, LLMs hav…

I have no doubts about that.

What I question here is OpenAI's article: it could be way more generous towards the reader.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#346

Post by MatejKafka »

NegativeK wrote: post #272
MatejKafka wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's about trying to handwave away the achievement. The problem is that many AI proponents, and especially companies producing the LLM tools constantly overstate the wins while downplaying the issues, and that leads to a (not always rational) counter-reaction from the other side.

The same crap happened with cryptocurrency: it was either aggressively pro or aggressively against, and everyone who could be heard was yelling as loud as they could so they didn't have to hear disagreement. There is no loud, moderate voice. It makes me very tired of the blasting rhetoric that invades _every_ space.

https://simonwillison.net/ is a pretty loud and moderate voice in the community. Also active on Lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/~simonw

But agree that there's an irrational level of tribalism on both sides.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#348

Post by cagz »

Does the article have a strong marketing vibe? Absolutely Does the research performed move the needle, however small, in theoretical physics? Yes Could we have expected this to happen a year ago? Not really.

My personal opinion is that things will only accelerate from here.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#349

Post by int_19h »

tedd4u wrote: post #193
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

What does a 12-hour solution cost an OpenAI customer?

$200/month would cover many such sessions every month.

The real question is, what does it cost OpenAI? I'm pretty sure both their plans are well below cost, at least for users who max them out (and if you pay $200 for something then you'll probably do that!). How long before the money runs out? Can they get it cheap enough to be profitable at this price level, or is this going to be "get them addicted then jack it up" kind of strategy?

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#350

Post by castigatio »

I'm not sure where people think humans are getting these magical leaps of insight that transcend combinations of existing things. Magic? Ghost in the machine? The simplest explanation is that "leaps of insight" are simply novel combinations that demonstrate themselves to have some utility within the boundaries of a test case or objective.

Snow + stick + need to clean driveway = snow shovel. Snow shovel + hill + desire for fun = sled

At one point people were arguing that you could never get "true art" from linear programs. Now you get true art and people are arguing you can't get magical flashes of insight. The will to defend human intelligence / creativity is strong but the evidence is weak.

Post reply on HN